Friday, July 7, 2017

Sonia Delaunay. Art, design and fashion

This summer the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza is presenting Sonia Delaunay. Art, design and
fashion, the first exhibition in Spain to be entirely devoted to this artist. As such its intention is to
emphasise not only her important role as an avant-garde painter but also the way in which she
successfully applied her aesthetic ideas to everyday life. Delaunay’s work as a painter will be
exhibited in the Museum’s galleries alongside her designs for books, theatrical sets, advertising,
interiors, fashion and textiles as well as items of clothing. In total there will be 210 exhibits
loaned from public institutions such as the Centre Pompidou, the Bibliothèque nationale de
France, the Musée de la Mode de Paris and the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, as well as from
private collections. The exhibition, which is benefitting from the collaboration of the Comunidad
de Madrid, will thus reflect recent art-historical research which has reassessed Delaunay’s career
with the aim of highlighting the multi-disciplinary nature of her work which allowed her to
explore supports and techniques other than painting.

Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979) was born into a modest Jewish family in the Ukraine. As a child she
went to live with her maternal aunt and uncle in Saint Petersburg, receiving a cosmopolitan
education from them. She started studying art in Karlsruhe (Germany) in 1904 and two years
later moved to Paris to continue her training. In order to be able to remain in France she married
the German art dealer Wilhelm Uhde, at whose gallery she first exhibited her work in 1908. It
was through Uhde that she met avant-garde artists such as Picasso, Braque and Robert
Delaunay, whom she married in 1910 following her divorce from the gallerist.

From that date onwards the artistic exchange between the
two would be an ongoing and constant one although from the
outset of their relationship Sonia differed from her husband in
combining her activities as a painter with other disciplines
such as embroidery and interior and fashion design. She thus
became a multi-disciplinary artist, concerned to express the
language of the avant-garde on the widest range of supports
and making use of bright, lively colours and a range of
techniques that reflect her Russian origins.

Around 1912 the Delaunays moved towards abstraction and
championed the basis of a new art which rejected traditional
media and was founded on the power of colour. This led
Robert Delaunay to develop the theory of Simultanism, a
neologism taken from Eugène Chevreul’s treatise on the
simultaneous contrast of colours, a text that argues that thetensions and optical vibrations generated by the relationship between complementary colours
suggest movement in a way comparable to the rhythmical model of dance and music. The
Delaunays associated Simultanism with modern life and urban progress and aimed to extend it
to all possible areas of creative activity. For the two artists Paris was the Simultanist city par excellence. It became their source of
inspiration and the place where they started to analyse the effect of light on colours. However, it
was in Madrid in 1917 that their experiments in translating the ideas of Simultanism to everyday
life moved into the public realm. It was there that Sonia began to work with performance arts
and also opened a boutique in which she sold her clothes and interior design objects. This phase
in Madrid, which took place exactly 100 years ago, was one of great freedom and
experimentation for Sonia Delaunay and would influence all her subsequent artistic
development from the 1920s onwards and following her return to Paris. Sonia Delaunay. Art,
design and fashion aims to present those Madrid years as a key moment in her career and they
are thus the subject of the central section of the exhibition, which is structured into four
chronological parts that also include the phases immediately prior to and following Delaunay’s
time in Spain.

Early Paris years

At the start of the
second decade of the century Simultanism dictated Sonia Delaunay’s activities as
she painted and made objects and clothes that reflected this new and colourful
aesthetic. A bedspread for her son’s cot is the first object traditionally
described as Simultanist. This wasfollowed by a painted toy box, book
covers, everyday objects and clothes sewn together from different pieces of
cloth. Delaunay combined her avant-garde experiments with the influence of
Russian folk art.

Her first creations reveal her quest for a total art, illustrating her desire to
introduce the Simultanist aesthetic into popular culture. The Delaunays’
apartment, a Sunday gathering place for artists and intellectuals, was the
first venue where these Simultanist creations were exhibited in the
manner of an art gallery. Sonia was committed to focusing without
distinction on the widest range of supports, considering all forms of artistic
expression to be of equal merit and worthy of exhibition. Thus, for
example, at the famous Autumn Salon in Berlin in 1913 she exhibited
paintings, poster designs, book bindings and domestic objects in the
company of works by Robert Delaunay, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Lyonel
Feininger, Franz Marc and Paul Klee, among others.

It was this context, in which fashion, painting and avant-garde were
closely interconnected, that gave rise to the “Simultanist dress” as a form
of introducing the public to the new visual language. The Delaunays wore
Sonia’s creations and transformed Parisian dance halls such as the Bal
Bullier into laboratories where they experimented with Simultanism in aninitial attempt to renew the aesthetic of the city through colour. With their
provocative mixtures of colours and materials, they caused a sensation and the
couple became “reformers of how to dress” in Apollinaire’s words.

During this period Sonia produced paintings that are among her most important
works. Above all, however, she exhibited Simultanist objects alongside Robert’s
paintings. The present exhibition includes oils such as

Dubonnet (1914)
and fashion designs, including the Simultanist dress and waistcoat made in
patchwork in 1914. Also on display will be a copy of La prose du Transsibérien et
de la petite Jehanne de France [Prose of the Trans-Siberian Railway and of Little
Jeanne of France] (1913), one of the masterpieces of avant-garde literature and
visual art and a collaborative creation between the poet Blaise Cendrars and
Sonia Delaunay which represents the first complete fusion of poetry and
painting. The book takes the form of a vertical fold-out measuring 2 metres long
which the user both looks at and reads simultaneously. Cendrars’ free verses
are reflected in Delaunay’s drawings in an interlinking of forms and colours that
suggest the forward movement of a train passenger.

First period in Madrid and Portugal

World War I broke out while the Delaunays were on holiday in Spain. As a
result, in late 1914 they decided to settle in Madrid. They were fascinated by
the city’s light, which contributed to the culmination of their investigations into
colour at this time. Separated from the avant-garde, they looked for inspiration
among the masters of the past and in 1915 Sonia registered as a copyist in the
Museo del Prado. Her canvases and Simultanist dresses for the Bal Bullier gave
way to an interest in folk art and in Flamenco singers and dancers involving a
degree of return to figuration. In the summer of 1915 the couple were invited to Portugal by a group of Futurist artists who had settled in
Vila do Conde, a small village in the north of the country and
they decided to move there for a while. Nonetheless Sonia
continued to be inspired Spain, evident in works such as

Madrid provides the core of this exhibition and the time SoniaDelaunay spent there resulted in a major change of direction
in her career as it allowed her to put into practice the idea that
Simultanism could extend to all areas of life. Following the
victory of the October Revolution in Russia in 1917 she nolonger received her allowance from her family which had previously given her financial stability.
She thus decided to launch her creations on a commercial basis.

In Madrid the Delaunays coincided with Sergei Diaghilev who had also taken refuge in Spain.
Sonia started to collaborate on the design of sets and costumes for the Ballets Russes, marking
the start of a close relationship with the performance arts that would continue throughout the
rest of her career.

This section of the exhibition includes some of her costume and set designs for
the Ballet Russes’ Cleopatra (1918) which was created in Sitges and first performed in London. It
also shows photographs of the complete redesign that Sonia Delaunay undertook of the old
Teatro Benavente in Madrid, transforming it into an innovative theatre-concert that opened with
the name of the Petit Casino in 1919.

“I opened a Maison Sonia for interior decoration” the artist recalled in her memoirs, “In wealthy
houses and historic palaces I did away with sugary pastels, gloomy colours and deadly frills and
furbelows.” The opening of this business, which also focused on the design of fashion and
accessories, marked a turning point in Sonia Delaunay’s career and can be considered an
important precedent for her intense focus on interior, textile and fashion design that began in
the 1920s.
Newspaper cuttings and photographs of the
period make it possible to reconstruct this
period in the exhibition and to present it as a
key moment in Delaunay’s career. This
documentation is accompanied by a selection
of her fashion sketches and a painted and
embroidered linen jacket (1928) which
evokes the spirit of what the Madrid press
came to call “the Sonia style”.

During these years in Madrid the Delaunays also established contacts with avant-garde poets
such as Ramón Gómez de la Serna and Guillermo de la Torre. Following her return to Paris in
1921 and inspired by the spirit of Dada, Sonia decided to decorate the walls of her house with
poems by her many poet friends, including Gómez de la Serna’s “Fan-poem” (1922). In herconstant desire to expand the boundaries of the
arts Sonia also designed “Dresses-Poem”, for
which two designs are on display in the
exhibition.

In 1921 the Delaunays returned to Paris. TheSpanish experience encouraged Sonia toproduce clothes for Parisian women based onthe designs of her paintings in the manner oftableaux vivants [living paintings]. During thoseyears she worked with Dada and Surrealistgroups on theatrical and film projects, including Le P’tit Parigot (1926) by Le Somptier. In 1925
Delaunay enjoyed success with her participation in a decorative arts exhibition and she began to
work for one of the large Dutch department stores, Metz & Co., a commercial relationship that
lasted until the 1950s.

This section of the exhibition emphasises the artist’s multifaceted and versatile manner of
approaching artistic creation, from painting on canvas to textiles, tapestries, lithographs, set
design and even commissions for murals. Objects displayed in this section include an
architectural model (1942), two dresses never previously included in an exhibition (1926), a
swimming costume and a matching beach parasol and bag (1928), together with a number of
earlier designs and the oil painting Simultaneous Dresses (1925) in which the garment worn by
the central figure is similar to the overcoat that Delaunay designed for the actress Gloria
Swanson that year and which is also on display in this gallery.

Complementing these exhibits are
the fashion photographs taken by Delaunay herself and a colour video which she made in 1925
to promote her designs. Finally, there is an extensive section on her textile designs which reveals
the creative process behind her clothing, from the initial drawing on paper or light card to thefinal product and including the correspondence that the
artist maintained with the Metz & Co., department
store, to which she sent samples of cloth and guidelines
for the production of her creations.

In 1937 Sonia participated with Robert on the
decoration of two large pavilions for the Universal
Exhibition in Paris, for which three preparatory designs
are included in this section. In the Railway Pavilion
Sonia evoked her journey to the Iberian Peninsula, once
again demonstrating the significance of that period in
her life.

After Robert Delaunay’s death in 1941 Sonia continued with her work and with the promotion of
abstract art. In 1964 and following her donation of a hundred of her and Robert’s works, she
became the first living woman to be honoured with an exhibition at the Musée du Louvre.

The exhibition closes with three large abstract compositions from the artist’s final phase: